Note: An update of this post on LibraryCity.org focuses on education-related issues of read-aloud apps. A Catch-22 dogs those of us who most often read e-books visually but also want to hear them when we’re exercising or driving. The usual e-bookware doesn’t always come with or work with text to speech capabilities. Even if it does, we can’t control the aural part as closely as we’d prefer. I myself like the Moon+ Reader Pro Android app, and I’m in love with the added-on “Amy” voice, a British-accented delight from another developer, Ivona, now an arm of Amazon. But I can’t revisit already-viewed text quickly enough while I’m hearing audio by...

I was presenting at a seminar last week, and someone came up to me afterwards and said he'd bought my book and was enjoying it. His only complaint was that the Kindle for Android app didn't support text to speech, and he wished he could listen to my book while he was driving. "No problem," I told him. "Ivona and Moon+ Reader." My books are all DRM-free, so it was easy for him to download the file and open it in Moon+ Reader. If you want to try this trick at home with different books, you may need to first remove DRM. I've...

Well, guess which Seattle-based  megaconglomerate has just bought Ivona Software (Web site here, Wikipedia entry here)—perhaps the world’s best provider of text to speech to use with e-books and other texts? That’s right, Amazon. It’s already using an Ivona voice in the Kindle Fire, and Ivona tech is also powering “Voice Guide” and “Explore by Touch.” Too bad those features aren’t available on the Paperwhite so far. Deliberate intra-brand market segmentation? Stinks either way. At any rate, even now, you can see Jeff Bezos’ corporate branding on the Ivona site. It’s too early to know how this will shake out for library users with disabilities and for other...

This probably won't come as too big of a surprise, but it was just announced this morning that Amazon has (finally!) acquired the 10-year-old text-to-speech software company IVONA Software for an undisclosed sum. (Not quite as exciting as the Zappos acquisition, but still ... ) The company currently offers voice and language proficiency in 44 voices and in 17 languages; it's already utilized by Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets. Aside from its text-to-speech capabilities, IVONA also provides the ‘Voice Guide’ and ‘Explore by Touch’ features for the Kindle Fire. “IVONA’s exceptional text-to-speech technology leads the industry in natural voice quality, accuracy and ease of use," said Dave Limp, VP, Amazon...

H.L. Mencken, the American iconoclast, depicted Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Could the same idea apply to the killjoys at Amazon who so cruelly made the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire HD less of an e-book machine and more of a billboard and cash register? Granted, many readers might not object because the Web has inured them to obnoxious huckstery of just the kind that H.L. hated. And they won’t miss the apps now AWOL from the Fire’s marketplace, such as the OverDrive software to read free e-books from libraries, because they never used them in the first place. But I myself do care. Unless the...